


Ishmael

by ExpositionFairy



Series: Scorch the Skies [3]
Category: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, TW: Emetophobia, tw: needles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:01:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21574144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExpositionFairy/pseuds/ExpositionFairy
Summary: Nimble's always been lucky, but in the Zone, "lucky" is relative.
Series: Scorch the Skies [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1547404
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Third entry in the _**Scorch the Skies**_ series bridging the gap between _Clear Sky_ and _Shadow of Chernobyl_

_“And only I am escaped alone to tell thee…"_

_- **Moby Dick** (paraphrasing the book of Job)_

—————

_He doesn’t know exactly how long he’s been running. More than a day, is the best he can figure. There was darkness at one point. Now it’s light again, for a given value of “light”. It all blurs together in the storm._

_Sometimes there are lulls in the storm, when the downpour lightens and the lightning stops flashing and the thunder quiets for an hour, two, three. Those are the times when he rests, when he hides among the hummocks and the reeds. The storm is his friend, right now. The thunder hides the sound of his passage as he slogs through the Swamps, the curtains of rain and wind obscure his movements, the lightning blinds the eyes of his pursuers. Mutants, mostly._

_But not_ just _mutants._

 _He avoids the farmsteads and the ruined villages and the tumbledown old Orthodox church, all the places that had once been theirs, or mostly theirs. He’s dead exhausted and he wants to stop, hole up in one of the old buildings and dry off and fucking sleep, but he can’t afford to take the chance. They might be waiting in one of the buildings, or all of them. Better to just keep moving. He’s got plenty of energy drinks in his pack, two Flashes in the set of lead-lined pouches at his belt, accurate maps on his PDA. He can run for days. But which_ way _?_

_Not east. Definitely not east. He knows he could slip past the military outpost’s machine guns and make it to the Cordon, he’s done it half a dozen times running errands for Suslov or Kalancha, it’s how he got his nickname. He and Vasya had been running that way to begin with, until they’d stumbled on what was left of Suslov._

_The circle. The heads._

_Vasya had freaked out and run. Hadn’t paid attention, hadn’t noticed the way the rain was warping and spiraling around itself just ahead of him. No more Vasya._

_North. North to the railroad tracks, then up through Hunter’s Woods. He could cut over to the Main Road from there…_

—————

Nimble was lost. Really, really fucking lost.

He’d gotten to the woods okay. _That_ part had been alright, except for a couple of Snorks. Thank fuck for Vasya’s SPAS-12. Way better than his sad old sawed-off. He’d taken a couple of swipes, nothing serious, and the combat shottie had laid the Snorks out without much of a fuss. It was worth the injuries just to be away from the Great Swamps. No more slogging through the marshes, looking over his shoulder, every minute expecting those.. _.freaks_ to ambush him and put his head on another pike. _When I get to the Cordon, I’ll buy a bottle and toast Vasya’s memory,_ he’d thought. _I’ll toast all of their memories. And then sleep. Sleep for a week._

Except he couldn’t find the Cordon. He couldn’t find the fucking _road._

He had exited the woods to find himself in rocky, scrubby hill country littered with tangled junk and scrap metal. The Garbage, according to the maps on his PDA, which told him he was south of some old industrial complex and west of the Main Road. Good. Great. Except then he’d tried to climb a hill for a good vantage and his dosimeter started clicking so fast it was _screeching_. He’d panicked, tripped and gone tumbling ass-over-end down the hillside in his haste to get back down. A dumbass rookie move if there’d ever been one. The PDA was still up there on that hill somewhere With the maps. 

_I_ , Nimble had thought, lying dazed in a bush with his right sleeve shredded to the elbow, _am fucked._

There was still the sun to navigate by, at least, but the Garbage was slow going overland. Terrifyingly slow. If the dosimeter wasn’t going apeshit, it was the anomaly alarm It felt like he was wasting fifteen minutes worth of nervous bolt-chucking for every fifteen meters he progressed. The hills were crawling with blind dogs and the occasional boar, and he was running perilously low on shotgun shells. Pretty soon he’d be reduced to his shitty little Makarov. He was exhausted, his injuries were hurting like hell, and he was starting to feel sick despite the Fireball he was carrying. 

Worst of all, the sun was starting to set.

It went down as he skirted around a jumbled pile of what looked like construction crane parts. For a long minute Nimble just stood and watched, unmindful of the constant click of the dosimeter, until there was nothing left of the light but a faint stripe of slightly lighter blue against the junk-strewn western horizon. He was alone, in this godforsaken irradiated no-man’s-land, with no PDA to navigate with or call for help, too little ammo and no medicine. At night.

_I am fucked._

——————

_“Vnimanie! Anekdot!”_

Wolf grinned to himself, listening to the others tell their campfire stories. He’d never admit it, but this was one of the things he liked best about life in the Zone. Not the firefights, not the thrill of picking your way through minefields of anomalies (or sometimes just literal minefields, if you spent most of your time in the Cordon like Wolf did), not the strange and hazardous wonder of the artifacts. Just a bunch of fellow stalkers gathered together around a fire, drinking, playing music, and telling stories to ward off the night.

Tonight he was camped out at the old vehicle scrapyard with Bes, Bes’s crew, and a small gaggle of Cordon rookies. The Garbage was a radioactive, anomaly-strewn shithole he normally preferred to avoid unless he was just passing through, but his new crop of rookies were another story. The Big Blowout had blasted artifacts out of seemingly every anomaly south of Rostok, enough of them that they were just scattered over the the hills like so much shrapnel and you didn’t even need a detector to locate them. Most of them weren’t of much use (or value, for that matter), but of course the newbies all had fucking stars in their eyes and had taken off from the Cordon like a bunch of greenhorn Alaskan prospectors who just heard there was gold in them thar hills. Wolf had followed, not because he particularly wanted to but because most of these kids were going to die without a babysitter. Hideously.

“…so Pravik and me, we’re searching the bodies and we hear a ‘whoosh’, and you know what we saw? A bandit spinning in midair! Must have been trying to get the drop on us, til that whirligig got the drop on _him!_ Stupid _gopnik_ too drunk to throw a bolt.”

Wolf snorted, passing a bottle of vodka Bes’s way. Good stuff, too, not that Cossacks rotgut that was a _hryvnia_ a dozen in the Zone. A working relationship with Sidorovich had its perks. And Bes was a good man and a good friend, an experienced Stalker who knew this whole area like the back of his hand. 

Bes took a swig, nodded his approval, then shot a skeptical eyebrow at the storytelling rookie. “Your clothes look mighty clean for someone downwind of a bandit caught in a whirligig,” he pointed out drily.

“See, that’s the best part though! It never went off all the way, so he just stayed up there spinning around like a flying saucer! Might even still be up there for all we know!”

That got them all cracking up, Bes included, and Wolf almost missed it–would have missed it, if not for the sixth sense most veterans gained after a while in the Zone: the sound of footsteps on gravel.

 _“Shut up, all of you!”_ he barked, raising his hand in a curt ‘quiet!’ motion and hoping the rookies would take the hint. He got to his feet, rifle at the ready. Bes and his men followed suit, a bare instant behind Wolf. Good.

The footsteps grew louder as they approached, and now they could see the flicker of a headlamp coming from the western end of the old vehicle graveyard. Not a bandit, Wolf didn’t think; a bandit would have either darted behind cover or opened fire by now. A Loner, then, most likely…but why hadn’t he announced himself?

“You there!” Bes called. “Who goes there?”

The figure staggered on toward them, finally close enough for Wolf to make out in the beam of his headlamp. A skinny guy in some kind of camo fatigues–it was impossible to make out the color in this light–and what looked like a retooled military flak vest that had seen much, much better days. One sleeve was completely shredded, and there was a bloody bandage around his right thigh. His face was white, his eyes wide and starey. 

“What the hell?” one of the rookies muttered.

“…don’t…don’t shoot….” the intruder croaked “Don’t shoot, please…” Then he fell to his knees, vomiting.

“Shit,” Wolf muttered, running up to the man and dropping down onto one knee next to him. Up close, he could see the guy was no older than most of his rookies, and that he was puking up mostly blood and bile. _Shit, shit, shit._ “Hang on, man,” he grunted.

He lugged the sick Stalker to his feet, slinging an arm around his shoulders and half-dragging, half-carrying him over to one of the bedrolls arranged around the fire. Drifter, one of the brighter rookies and the one Wolf had pegged as Most Likely to Survive a Year, held out a canteen of purified water and a medkit, but Wolf shook his head. “Get me one of the better ones out of my pack. Should be in a yellow box.” He’d traded for those from the Ecologists up at Lake Yantar, and they were worth every ruble. “And the pack of antirad syrettes.”

“Waste of meds,” one of Bes’s men grumbled as Drifter tossed him the packages. “Better to put him out of his misery now.”

“When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it,” Wolf snarled back. The sick Stalker was retching again, groaning. Wolf ripped the wrapper off of a pre-loaded antirad syringe, bit the cap off, and jammed the needle into the Stalker’s hip. The kid yelped, and Wolf figured that for a good sign. He followed the antirads with a dose of morphine out of the scientists’ medkit, then squatted back on his heels to get a better look while the meds kicked in and the young Stalker got his breath back.

In the firelight, at close inspection, the Stalker looked like 500km of bad road run hard. There was definitely bullet damage to the vest, which probably meant bruised or broken ribs underneath. The wound on the right thigh looked like claw slashes from an mutant attack, and the shredded sleeve revealed what was either a badly infected scrape or a nasty beta burn all the way up his forearm–probably both, considering the dirt here. There wasn’t much left of the man’s pack but the straps, but he was very obviously carrying three or four artifacts in the pouches on his utility belt–one of them a Fireball, judging from the heat Wolf could feel radiating even through the lead lining. A savvy choice that had probably saved the man’s life here, where you could eat 200 rem just picking the wrong path to walk down.

He set about stripping off the vest and cutting off the old bandages so he could get at the unfortunate Stalker’s injuries, talking to him while he did so in the hopes of keeping him conscious. “Lucky you didn’t get shot for a bandit, wandering in here in the middle of the night like that,” he chided. “Fuck, you’re lucky you didn’t get shot _by_ a bandit out here. Garbage is crawling with the scum. You got a name, friend?”

“…Nimble,” the Stalker managed, voice slurred and gravelly from the vomiting and the drugs. “…was trying to find the Cordon…come up through the Woods, then down the road…thought…I was safe…but I got lost…lost my PDA, dogs got my pack…thought I was dead, til I saw your fire.”

The Stalker’s clothes were filthy, caked in mud and blood, but there was a patch on his shoulder that caught Wolf’s eye–not the usual black-on-yellow radiation symbol that most Loners wore, though. Two birds flying over the rising sun, on a sky-blue field. The writing underneath was half-obscured by mud, but Wolf could read it just the same. _Chistoye Nebo._

_Clear Sky._

Wolf glanced up at Bes, beckoning him over. “You came up from the Great Swamps?”

Nimble nodded weakly, eyes glassy. Bes looked him over, eyes narrowing with suspicion “Nobody in the Great Swamps but bandits. Call themselves Renegades, like they’re a legitimate faction.” He spat to the side. 

Nimble shook his head, crying out as Wolf poured antiseptic solution over the inflamed claw slashes in his thigh. “Not me…not us. We were down there too. Clear Sky. Nobody… _ah fuck!_ ….nobody knew…just a few people, the trader at the Cordon, a doctor up in Yantar….”

“He’s telling the truth,” Wolf said “I’ve seen his folks at the village. They come in to trade with Sidorovich every now and again, if they manage to make it past the military outpost. Some kind of armed science unit, eggheads with guns. What the hell are you doing up here in the Garbage, kid, all by yourself? This is a bad, bad place to be lost.”

“…came up through the woods…” Nimble slurred. The drugs were really hitting hard now; he could barely string words together. “…nobody left down there…..just me…Vasya fell in an anomaly and died… _.they_ got everyone else, but I outran them….”

Wolf frowned at that. “They? The bandits, the Renegades or whatever?”

Nimble’s eyes slowly closed. “…not bandits…don’t know who they were….came after the blowout, in the night….burned our place, killed everyone…I saw Trodnik, he was with _them_ , but he wasn’t..he wasn’t _him_ ….they killed everyone…” He trailed off, head lolling to the side.

Wolf finished re-bandaging the young Stalker’s injuries and sat back, still frowning. He looked over at Bes. “That make any sense to you?”

Bes shrugged. “Kid’s rad-sick and doped to the gills. Who knows what the hell he’s talking about. What are you going to do with him?”

“Take him back to the village, if he makes it through the night.” And Wolf thought he _would_ make it through the night. Young and skinny as he was, he was clearly tougher than he looked–tough enough and smart enough to have evaded whatever had befallen his comrades down in the Swamps, to have survived wandering the woods and the Garbage for what must have been days. Wolf knew experienced stalkers who might not have made it. He admired Nimble for it. But he was unsettled by the kid’s story, filtered through delirium though it was. 

_I saw Trodnik, he was with_ them _, but he wasn’t…he wasn’t_ him _…_

He knew Ivan Trodnik. He was a Guide, a rare, valuable, and dangerous trade here in the Zone, and he was good at his job. He’d worked the routes from Cordon all the way up through Rostok and beyond, before moving south to map the Great Swamps. Wolf had last seen him maybe two or three weeks ago, dressed in blue-and-white fatigues and good armor with the same Clear Sky patch on his shoulder, escorting a big Merc to see Sidorovich. Clearly he’d joined these people at some point. Had he betrayed them? To _who_? What had Nimble meant by “he wasn’t him”, or had that just been the delirium talking? It was bothering him.

Something bad had happened to the Clear Sky faction, that was certain, and Wolf wanted to know what the hell it was. The Great Swamps weren’t far from the Cordon and the rookie village. If there was a chance of trouble moving north toward them, Wolf wanted to be ready for it.

_They came in the night…they killed everyone…_

He stayed awake, smoking, listening to the groans and shrieks of the Zone and the survivor’s ragged, labored breathing, for the rest of the night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Drugs, fever, and shellshock, oh my.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was fun getting to play around with Nimble's nonexistent backstory a bit, and to speculate what might've drawn him to the Zone in general and Clear Sky in particular.

_ He’s nineteen years old, in his dormitory room at the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics in Minsk, nominally studying, really just waiting for the sun to go down so he can meet his friends on the roof. The old soviet-era buildings might be dreary concrete rabbit hutches during the day, but they’re the perfect place to practice parkour with your buddies after dark. _

_ He spins idly in his chair, noting the square of red-orange sunset light on the floor from the window, and grins--but that’s odd, that window faces  _ south _ , how can the light of sunset be so strong… _

_ Then the shockwave comes, a dull heavy THUD rolling up through the floor and the walls like a wave, and he rushes to the window. The southern sky is on fire, shifting and boiling, lightning crackling outwards across the arc of the sky in all directions. _

Nuke,  _ he thinks distantly, unable to take his eyes from the window, from the expanding blaze of light on the horizon. But that’s wrong too. He may be studying at one of the premier technical and engineering universities in Belarus, but you don’t need to be a genius to see this is no nuke. There’s no mushroom cloud, for one, but that’s practically insignificant in the face of that spreading ring of lightning, the shaking that’s still going on when it should have long since faded.  _

_ And there are voices. _

_ He can  _ hear  _ them, not with his ears but seemingly from the center of his brain, vibrating the bone of his skull. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Perhaps millions. A hundred languages. So many voices, all of them terrified. Human voices. _

_ And one that  _ isn’t.

_It calls out in human words, but the voice itself is so far from human that his mind almost shatters at the sound of it. It calls out_ to him _, Mikalaj Evgenevic Kovalchuk that was, buzzing and echoing and alien_ _and terrifyingly, nightmarishly compelling._

**COME TO ME….**

_ He collapses to the floor, screaming, hands over his ears. He can hear, as if through cotton, the sounds of his dorm-mates running in the halls and shouting, and the incessant ring of the fire alarms. Other people. Reality. Safety. He regains his feet, scrambling for the door. If he can just make it to the door… _

_ \------------------ _

Rough hands, rolling him onto his side. A stabbing pain in his hip, like a wasp sting. And a voice, low and cigarette-roughened but completely human.

“Hey. Gotta wake up for a bit. You need to drink something.”

Nimble groaned, trying to crack open eyelids that seemed glued shut. He saw blurry firelight and shadows moving against a wall. Everything felt slippery, far away. He rolled weakly onto his back and tried to prop himself up onto an elbow to see more, but his body refused. He closed his eyes again, but the hands grabbed him, hauling him up and propping him against what felt like a knee. 

“Sorry, my friend, but you can’t go back to sleep yet. You’re dehydrated as fuck, you have to drink or you’re going to die.” A canteen was held to Nimble’s lips. The water was tepid and flat-tasting and swallowing was painful, but he was desperately thirsty. He gulped greedily at the water, choked, and collapsed back, coughing. “Not so fast, you’ll start puking again.”

_ Where am I,  _ he wanted to ask, but his voice wouldn’t cooperate; it was all he could do just to breathe as the world blurred and spun and swam away again, sinking him back into darkness.

\--------------------

  
_ He opens the door and he’s home again. Not his old dorm, but his little curtained-off closet of a room in the Clear Sky base. He can hear shouted curses outside, and laughter, and boots splashing through stagnant water, and, far far off, the staccato rattle of a rifle. Staticky music playing over the jury-rigged speaker system. Sunlight falling in thin stripes through the cracks in the old, warped board walls.  _ Home.

_ He’s twenty-five years old and his name isn’t Mikalaj anymore, hasn’t been for years now, he ignores it, recoils from it any time he hears it. He was Kolya, for a little while, until he came here and got a chance to really show off how good he is at running and climbing and dodging. Now they call him Nimble, and he likes that a lot better. The voice in his head that day hadn’t called him Nimble.  _

_ He pushes himself up off the bed, stretching, thinking he’ll go bug Cold for some food and catch up on the latest news, when he realizes he’s wrong, it’s all  _ wrong _. The shouts outside are cries of alarm, what he at first thought was laughter is really  _ screams,  _ and the far-away gunfire isn’t far away anymore--it’s _ right outside.  _ The sunlight shining through the cracks in the wall isn’t sunlight, it’s  _ firelight _ ; the static over the intercom not static at all but the crackle of flames… _

_ He yanks the curtain aside and he’s in the woods, running through the woods, away from the swamps and the fire and the death. It’s dark beneath the trees, but the sun is coming up and the rain has stopped. All he has to do is follow his maps to the road and he’ll be safe. _

_ He stops to rest, leaning with one hand against a tree to catch his breath and get his bearings, only to snatch it away as it begins to tingle and burn. The tree is dead, he realizes, an old dead pine with rust-red needles. This isn’t the Hunter’s Woods, the dense green barrier of oak and birch girding the southern borders of the Zone. Here,  _ all _ the trees are dead. _

Brother _ , a voice calls from behind him. _

_ He turns around and they’re there, the men who’d been his friends and his comrades in arms. Professor Kalancha is there, who’d recruited him from the University. Ivan Trodnik, the guide, who’d taught him how to navigate the Swamps. Lyonya and Timka, who’d taken him under their wing those first nutty weeks in the Zone and taught him firearms. They stand before him in a rough half-circle, the men of Clear Sky who’d gone off to the center to stop the emissions and save the Zone. Their clothes are all grey, and their faces, but their eyes are alive with some alien light that holds Nimble transfixed despite his terror. _

_ One steps forward, a giant of a man with a hatchet-carved face and glowing eyes peering out from beneath the cowl of the old-fashioned grey traveler’s cloak he wears. Nimble thinks he knows this man too, though he only saw him briefly. He’d been a marvel, after all. The man the Zone couldn’t kill. _

Come to us, brother _ , says the giant, his voice a flat and toneless drone.  _ You are one of us. Come to us. Join us.

**COME TO ME….**

_ Nimble’s paralysis breaks. He turns to run, but makes it only a couple of feet before running full-tilt into some structure, a crazy construction made of junk parts and scrap metal, fully ten feet high. Lebedev is bound to the structure with hanks of rusty barbed wire, staring sightless eyes weeping blood. _

**COME TO ME...**

_ There’s nowhere to run. _

Wake up,  _ a voice whispers inside his head. _

_ Dead trees in a dead wood. Insanity behind him. Death ahead of him. _

Wake  **up,** _ the new voice insists.  _

_ And Nimble wakes up. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Mikalaj" is the Belarusian localization of the common Slavic name "Nikolai", of which the nickname "Kolya" is a diminutive.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Vnimanie! Anekdot!_ = Here's an anecdote/story/joke! Literally "Attention! Storytime!"  
>  _hryvnia_ = Ukrainian currency  
>  _gopnik_ = Hooligan, hoodlum, good-for-nothing, etc.


End file.
